Tag Archives: verbose

The arping application is a simple command that will allow you to ping devices by hostname, IP address, or MAC address. The unfortunate part is that most device will not respond to the arp requests, which are directed broadcast ICMP echo requests, though there are some out there that do. I go into more detail below regarding pinging via MAC address by providing an example of the typical output, example output when a MAC address responds to the ICMP echo requests, and details about how to configure hosts to respond to these ICMP echo requests. I also show a couple of the switches available with arping and provide examples of using arping to ping devices by IP and host.

Network stress testing is taken for granted sometimes however it is extremely useful in many aspects of a network. Typically when someone is thinking of stress testing something technology related they are thinking of stress testing a web application of some sort however it is beneficial to also stress test every piece of network hardware from the firewall to the web server that the application is running on to make sure there are no weaknesses once packets touch your network. With that said there are some great applications within Backtrack that provide stress testing capabilities such as siege which is classified as a HTTP/HTTPS Stress Tester which depending on the location you test from could also test network hardware between the Internet and the web server running the application being tested.

Last night I was creating some manual backups from a server including an entire web sites data files as well as the databases associated with that same web site. I decided to use the tar archiving utility to pack all of the files from the web site into a single file so it could be downloaded and stored easily. Use the information below to exclude a sub directory when creating a tar archive.